The third leg of the PGA Tour's hefty $35 million FedEx Cup couldn't have pulled into metro Denver at a better time, another boost in the run of high-value exposure for the city and region that has gone on all summer, experts say.

With national exposure of local sporting events already at a zenith — college football's University of Colorado vs. Colorado State University Rocky Mountain Showdown, the USA Pro Challenge cycling race, and just about every ball Broncos quarterback Peyton Manning has tossed — the BMW Championship at Cherry Hills Country Club is teeing up a record-breaking tourism season.

"This has shaped up to be one of the best tourism seasons ever," Visit Denver spokesman Rich Grant said.

Fans watch Rory McIlroy tee off on the second hole Thursday at Cherry Hills Country Club. (John Leyba, The Denver Post)

So good, he said, that it's looking more and more like it will rival the mammoth numbers logged in 1995, when Coors Field, Elitch Gardens Theme and Water Park, and Denver International Airport all opened.

"This is looking bigger than that — and we haven't even started the Broncos season yet," Grant quipped.

Hotel room and convention occupancy is up by 42 percent this year — "it looks to be the second-best ever," he said. In another sign of the explosion, 90 new eateries have opened in metro Denver in just the past three months.

"Some might try to say it's the marijuana-legalization thing," Grant said, "but there's not any infrastructure for it to make that kind of difference."

The arrival of the world's best professional golfers competing for not only pieces of the $8 million purse at Cherry Hills Country Club, but the FedEx points earned here that help toward the eventual $10 million winner, makes the tournament a must-see event on television or in person.

"The weather has been spectacular for all these events, and to see it yet again on the Golf Channel, when most of the rest of the country is just having a lousy summer of heat waves, floods and fires — and we have had none — you can't ask for better publicity," Grant said.

Denver flexes its regional brand with every large-scale event, but some say stepping outside the norm of what's expected goes a long way to boosting the area's presence even further.

"Denver is a major-league city," said Pocky Marranzino, owner of Karsh Hagan, the agency that developed the state's "Come to Life" national tourism campaign. "A golf tournament like the BMW Championship allows Denver and the surrounding area to be on par, so to speak, with other major- league cities. To secure one of the biggest events in pro golf enhances the state's image as a top attraction to tourists and businesses."

How ongoing coverage converts to hard dollars, though, is often hard to estimate with any precision, Grant notes.

For instance, the Pro Challenge's 550-mile route carried the world's top cyclists from Aspen to Denver over seven days, bringing with them a guesstimate of about $100 million in tourism spending. The finish line alone packed about 250,000 people downtown.

Then there was last weekend's A Taste of Colorado — Festival of Mountain and Plain, which drew an estimated 500,000 people into the city's Civic Center core over four days.

"I don't think I'd ever seen crowds quite like that," Grant said. "The city is simply stepping up with more great things to do. But the translation of numbers isn't always so exacting."

Denver's unique location — a major city with teams in all four top-tier professional sports and drawing fans from a 600-mile radius — plays into a number of scenarios where visitors come for not just a single event or attraction, but layer their experience.

"You come to Denver to catch a game, a tournament and a few other things," Grant said, noting late summer has been host to the nation's largest Scottish festival in Estes Park as well as the Rocky Mountain Showdown in Denver.

"The intangible is that this is all the icing," he said. "Everyone knows about our great skiing and hiking, but spectacular golf is a less-known item. It all ties nicely together."

Not all kids who play baseball are uniformed with fancy script across their chests, traveling to $1,000 instructional camps and drilled how to properly hit the cut-off man. Some kids just play to play.